Archive for November, 2012

“On 19 March 2013, 10 years will have passed since Australian, British and US forces (and a Polish contingent) invaded Iraq. The reasons we did so, and maintained a military presence there for most of the decade, were unclear then and are not yet satisfactorily explained. The invasion took place without the approval of the UN Security Council and, according to most international lawyers, in defiance of international law.

Coalition forces overthrew the government of Iraq, and then and in the years that followed they killed and wounded many thousands of Iraqis, as well as sustaining great losses themselves. Prisoners under coalition supervision were tortured and killed, cities were devastated and degradation of the countryside was widespread….”

Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser AC CH

August 2012

Why not sign the appeal for an Iraq war inquiry? As of 30 nov. only 30 more signatures to go! All you have to do is click the box in the post below

Professor John Langmore, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne; former MP for Fraser; former director of UN Division of Social Policy and Development, and representative of the ILO to the UN

Edward Santow, CEO, Public Interest Advocacy Centre

Lt Gen (ret’d) John Sanderson, former Chief of the Australian Army, and former Governor of WA.

Professor Gerry Simpson, Professor of International Law, University of Melbourne

Professor Richard Tanter, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Melbourne; Senior Research Associate, Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability

Professor Ramesh Thakur, Professor of International Relations, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Adjunct Professor, Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law, Griffith University; former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General

Dr Sue Wareham, Vice-President, Medical Association for Prevention of War

Garry Woodard, former ambassador; Senior Fellow, Dept of Politics, University of Melbourne

Tim Wright, Australian director, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

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Tony Abbott needs a timely reminder of his craven form re demonising the defenceless. As he and his moronic inferno of negative shadows attack the character of Australia’s first woman PM, Julia Gillard, and continue to peddle their mantra of “stop the boats”, fear and bile, let’s cast our minds back to October 2007…

…Abbott’s moral bankruptcy was displayed by his actions as Federal Health minister during the ghastly Howard era:

The Sydney Morning Herald, Age, ABC and other Oz media reported that in October 2007, whilst Federal Health Minister…

Abbott accuses asbestos fighter of political stunt:

THE Federal Government last night picked a fight with a national hero, after the Health Minister, Tony Abbott, attacked the dying leader of the campaign to win justice for the victims of asbestos poisoning.

Mr Abbott accused Bernie Banton, who three years ago received an Order of Australia for his efforts to get compensation from James Hardie, of being involved in a political stunt.

Mr Banton and members of the Construction Union protested outside Mr Abbott’s electorate office in Manly yesterday, because the minister has yet to approve a drug, Alimta, which can prolong the lives of mesothelioma sufferers, for the pharmaceutical benefits scheme.

Mr Banton, who is wheelchair-bound and dying of the disease, got off his sick bed to make the journey across Sydney yesterday but Mr Abbott left before the protesters arrived. Last night the minister told Channel Nine: “Look, it was a stunt, let’s be upfront about this. I know Bernie is very sick but just because a person is sick doesn’t mean that he is necessarily pure of heart in all things.”

But last night Mr Banton returned fire at the minister. “What a flea,” he told the Herald. “What a gutless human being. He wasn’t game enough to front up and face the very people his Government is denying treatment to.”

Andrew West, SMH, October 31, 2007

A health minister who attacks a terminally ill man becomes shadow leader and a stain on Oz politics. A nasty, moral coward called Tony Abbott.

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“We had to fight even for the right of dying cancer victims to get a speedy trial. I recall sitting in the WA Supreme Court in an interlocutory hearing for the test cases involving Wittenoom miners Mr Peter Heys and Mr Tim Barrow. CSR was represented by Ms Julie Bishop (then Julie Gillon). (She) was rhetorically asking the court why workers should be entitled to jump court queues just because they were dying.”

Meanwhile, in the world beyond dodgy victorian-wanker air pollution, the United Nations announced Friday November 23rd 2012:

“Across the region… the number of Syrian refugees in surrounding countries now stands at 442,256, an increase of more than 213,000 since the beginning of September,” UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards told reporters in Geneva

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A new study by the International Monetary Fund shows that Australia’s ‘big four’ banks are the most concentrated in the world and are among the most profitable in the world.

The IMF has released its Financial System Stability Assessment for Australia – 16 November, 2012:

“The IMF publication shows the absurdity of claims by the Australian Bankers’ Association’s Steven Munchenberg that Australia’s big banks are ‘fiercely competitive’,” said The Australia Institute’s Senior Research Fellow David Richardson.

In fact the IMF said Australian banks enjoy “pricing power” and are “highly profitable”. The IMF’s assessment also said “in fact, Australian banks are currently among the most profitable in the world”. That is clear in the following graph (to see graph download media release) which shows Australia’s big four banks make up half of the eight most profitable banks in the world.

“The IMF study confirms the view that high concentration allows banks to extract very high profits from the Australian community. Super profits represent a major challenge for Australian policy makers,” said Mr Richardson.

An Australia Institute analysis recently showed that people taking out an average mortgage could potentially save $1,200 per annum by choosing a mutually-owned bank, credit union or building society, instead of one of the big four banks.

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David Beckham has announced that next month’s Major League Soccer championship will be his final game with the Los Angeles Galaxy – but wasn’t coy over his next move, saying that he was “enjoying his new watch.”

Disembarking at Luton (UK), keeping up with the constant challenges of a hectic global schedule, Beckham shared with us lines he’d prepared inflight for the breaking Saatchi Asia Brietling campaign, with print currently launching through the Caucasian and other regional broadsheets:

“So I said to them, Trevor, I said…I’ve got a new watch…”

...Hallow. My name’s David. David Beckham. I’ve got a new watch. It’s mine. I like my new watch. Shiny. It understands that I’m a man of my time. My new watch, that is. I like my new watch. Buttons round it quite a bit, oh yes. I can press them…I can push my own buttons, by themselves and myself too. Look. It’s my new watch.Rubber- molded bidirectional rotating bezels of time that serve to read off a seventh timezone, at the end of the day..."

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“After four years of financial crisis, this balance between democracy and the market has been destroyed. On the one hand, governments’ massive intervention to rescue the banks and markets has only exacerbated the fundamental problem of legitimization that haunts governments in a democracy. The usual accusation is that the rich are protected while the poor are bled dry. Rarely has it been as roundly confirmed as during the first phase of the financial crisis, when homeowners deeply in debt lost the roof over their heads, while banks, which had gambled with their mortgages, remained in business thanks to taxpayer money…”

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Romney “Blames Loss” on covert satanic messages

By Ben Harridan

Saying that he and his team still felt “tousled” by his loss to President Obama, Mitt Romney on Wednesday attributed his defeat in part to what he called the blatant yet covert satanic messages that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters.

In a conference call with fund-raisers, Mormon elders and donors to his campaign, a perturbed Mr. Romney said Wednesday afternoon that the president had followed the “old secular playbook device” of using covert satanic messages to woo specific interest groups — “especially young people.”

“In each case, they gave covert satanic messages to those groups,” Mr. Romney said, contrasting Mr. Obama’s strategy to his own of “talking gospel truths for the whole country: a bigger, louder military, a strong economy, at the end of the day, creating jobs for men and so forth.”

Mr. Romney’s stirring comments in the 20-minute conference call came after his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, told WISC-TV in Madison on Monday that their loss was a result of Mr. Obama’s strength in “disturbed, secular areas,” an analysis that did not account for Mr. Obama’s victories in more rural states like Iowa and New Hampshire or the decrease in the number of votes for the president relative to 2008 in critical urban counties in Ohio.

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a covert satanic message,” Mr. Romney said. “Free contraceptives were covert satanic messages with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 56 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big covert satanic message to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

“The whole issue of Palestinian self determination is at risk here,” saidRichard Falk, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian occupied territories since 1967. “The longer the process is delayed, the less realistic it is to believe that these settlers and the large settler population can be removed in such a way as to create a Palestinian State.”

Mr. Falk briefed correspondents after presenting his annual report to the General Assembly’s Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural), in which he encouraged a boycott of United States industry giants Caterpillar Inc., Hewlett Packard and Motorola, Israeli cosmetic firm Ahava, Cemex of Mexico, Veolia Environment of France, G4S of the United Kingdom and Volvo Group of Sweden, among others, and for civil society to join that effort (See Press Release GA/SCH/4048).

He said the focus on the business community was partly an expression of frustration over the failure to persuade Israel to comply with its fundamental legal obligations and the ineffectiveness of the United Nations efforts to condemn expansion of the settlements, which had grown 5.3 per cent on average annually in the past decade, and now covered more than 40 per cent of the West Bank.

In the last year alone, 15,000new settlers had taken root in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while Israeli officials had moved to legalize some 100 outposts previously considered unlawful under Israeli law, he said, and added that settler violence against the local Palestinian population in those areas was growing.

“This is an attempt to reach out beyond the intergovernmental and international institutional system,” Mr. Falk said, stressing that illegal settlements were “a core concern of those that seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict” through the two-State solution.

Asked if creation of an independent Palestinian State was still viable, he said that notion was in severe jeopardy and that it was much harder to envision how a sustainable peace could be achieved through the proposed two-State solution.

Such a solution was crucial for ensuring Palestinian rights and reducing regional tensions and violence.”

“Being in isolation to me felt like I was on an island all alone…dying a slow death from the inside out…”

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) have just released ‘Growing Up Locked Down’, a 141 page report examining the plight of children in solitary confinement in US prisons. Based on research in both US jails and prisons in five states ­– Colorado, Florida, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania – and correspondence with young people in 14 others, this report is freely and publicly available here @ HRW.org:

“The isolation of solitary confinement causes anguish, provokes serious mental and physical health problems, and works against rehabilitation for teenagers…”

Here in Australia, independent public broadcaster the ABC, has recently reported on child detention in the state of Victoria – an excerpt from Josie Taylor’s 31 Oct 2012 story, ‘Aboriginal teen kept in solitary confinement’ follows:

Victorian lawyers and the Child Safety Commissioner have raised serious concerns about a 16-year-old Aboriginal boy who was held in solitary confinement at one of the state's adult jails.The teen spent nearly four months in solitary confinement at the Charlotte maximum security unit inside Port Phillip Prison while under the protection of the Department of Human Services (DHS). Legal experts now want to know how many other juveniles are inside adult jails...

More recent reports, including a social worker’s estimate, say up to six children are being kept in solitary confinement in a maximum-security adult prison in Victoria, (Oz), …on an island all alone?

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"Australia has 40% of the world's uranium, all of it on indigenous land. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just been to India to sell uranium to a government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and whose enemy, Pakistan, is also a non-signatory. The threat of nuclear war between them is constant. Uranium is an essential ingredient of nuclear weapons. Gillard's deal in Delhi formally ends the Australian Labor Party's long-standing policy of denying uranium to countries that reject the NPT's obligation "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament"

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“Books banned in China have been flying off the shelves in Hong Kong in the run-up to China’s leadership transition as mainland people seek insight into the decision makers who will run their country and the rivals who have fallen out of favor…”

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The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization… The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

Journalist John Pilger describes the augmented Anglo-American government and media campaign against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as Assange is granted political asylum by Ecuador and remains in that country’s London embassy.

Here @ the interpretOr, we seem to recall that Assange and wikileaks won the 2011 Walkley award (Oz) for “Most outstanding contribution to journalism”…

and here’s background excerpt from JohnPilger.com:

“…Like many of his Australian generation, Pilger and two colleagues left for Europe in the early 1960s. They set up an ill-fated freelance ‘agency’ in Italy…and quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid.He became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he became the youngest journalist to receive Britain’s highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year and was the first to win it twice. Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late 1960s and 1970s. He marched with America’s poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968…”

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an interpretOr had a bad dream recently and it went a bit like this...

…Aymen…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr…

“Look here, Rhoades. After I speak, you’re going to hear from Secretary Ann Coulter. That’s a good thing. I think it’s important to get the views of moderates – the likes of she and Rupert Murd…moderate views around the new, the new cabinet table vista.”

uhhh…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr.

“My himmediate changes in federal welfare-to-work rules…they will…they will end a culture of deeependency and restore a culture of good hard work…Foxcon is a beacon on the sacred pathway…’ndeedy…His blueprint, no less.”

uhhh…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr.

“Rhoades…Anne, geee, Missus Pruzudunt Anne…she…Anne is my sacred torch-bearer, my torch-bearer…my bearer on the journey…from the roadmap…quite sincerely, fellow Ameri… At the end of the day…what I took from Bain was more than mere money…more than how ta turn a buck…I acquired a vision…a sacred vision that led me here across the hard rugged terrain, of the ravine…that…ruggedly constitutes the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…

uhhh…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr.

“I am here now. We shall move forwards..move forward on a united front…The business model of the prison is more to me than mere abstract notion…a fantasy…it is nothing short of…of a miracle…the fruit of His toil…’nd Foxcon is sweet poetry…in motion…’nda doublin’ Guantanamo pronto…Cheney poised ‘n preenin on Iran..Bibi’s a fan-doodly on side. Phase Four in motion…we’re kickun asss, Rhoades.

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Al Jazeera’sAndrew Thomas reports from Sydney on the plight of 70 North Koreans who have fled their troubled country for Australia, where they’ve found that the country’s restrictions – that no one with dual citizenship may apply for an Australian passport – means they might soon be forced to leave to face an uncertain future in South Korea where the sustainability of their safety is a matter of concern…

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Who understands the human mind better: Psychologists or crime writers? This was the theme of a free public event organised by the Society’s Scottish branch, which took place recently at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. Karen Goodall (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh) listened to the debate – this report originally appeared in the August edition of The Psychologist, (British Psychological Society):

“Despite the summer downpour the venue was full, a testament to the popularity of the speakers: best-selling novelist Ian Rankin and psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman, (of ’59 seconds’ fame). Rankin, arguably Scotland’s best crime writer, is author of 33 titles, including the hugely popular Inspector Rebus series. He recently received the OBE for services to literature. Wiseman researches the psychology of luck, self-help, persuasion and illusion, and is the most followed UK psychologist on Twitter. His bestselling books have been translated into over 30 languages and he was named one of the top 100 people who make Britain a better place to live…